


A linguistics essay about Miya Atsumu

by ElsaFH (Elsa0806)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Volleyball, Character Study, Fluff, Law Student Miya Atsumu, Linguistics Student Hinata Shouyou, M/M, Mentions of alcohol, Pining Hinata Shouyou, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, University Student Hinata Shouyou, University Student Miya Atsumu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26884645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsa0806/pseuds/ElsaFH
Summary: Atsumu is like a word, something worthy of scientific study. And Shouyou, an avid linguistics student, wants nothing but to break down the concept that he is, very much like he has done with every book he’s had to read for his degree.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 32
Kudos: 87





	A linguistics essay about Miya Atsumu

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY ATSUHINA DAY!!!!! HELL YEAHHHH!!! 
> 
> Yes, I did take advantage of me being a linguistics student to write this. No, I don't feel ashamed about it. Give me a break, linguistics is beautiful and Atsumu is beautiful and both Shouyou and me are head over heels for both of them. Hence this fic. 
> 
> I hope you all like it! 

The first thing Shouyou learned during his first week as a linguistics student was that language shapes reality.

Languages, he learned that week, are the bond between our brains and the world around us. They’re the channel through which we develop our personalities and relationships with the reality outside of our brains and with the people living in it. They shape the sluggish, nonsensical mass of _stuff_ that spirals in our heads like a whirlpool, giving it meaning and substance.

When he met Miya Atsumu, a laws student, in his third week of college, he didn’t think he’d be able to apply the concepts he’d learned to a person.

It was weird to be able to define him in such complicated and, dare he say, _pretentious_ words. Shouyou was sure there wasn’t a bunch of authors that wrote _so badly_ while studying the languages around the world as linguists. Granted, a lot of them put the concepts in beautiful descriptions… that turned his brain into mush whenever he tried to break them down to understand them.

Take, for example, Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, languages aren’t nomenclatures, which means the translation between one language and the other cannot be done through the simple process of transforming one word into its equivalent in another language. Shouyou learned that Atsumu wasn’t a nomenclature as a person when he realized that he wasn’t as much of a jerk as he wanted to make himself look; yes, the man was a whiny pain in the ass, top-notch drama queen, and he would totally walk into court and say “mothers and fuckers of the jury” just for shit and giggles.

He wasn’t just _that_ , though. Atsumu was in fact all the things mentioned above, but the more he got to know him, the more Shouyou realized that he tried to hide the infinite kindness that lived within him. Using his jerkiness as makeup to cover up all the goodness he hid from the rest of the world because, according to what he’d told him since he met him, that’s the way they wanted to see him.

“If they want to see me as a jerk,” he’d said one day, shrugging over his cup of coffee —black as his soul, as he’d called it, as much of a cliché as that is—, “that’s what I’ll give ‘em.”

Shouyou giggled softly. He hadn’t realized until then how much he giggled when he was with Atsumu.

“Do you really think that’s healthy, Atsumu-san?” he asked. It was his fifth week in college. Shouyou had already had to read five books, write three papers, and he was pretty sure he was about to fail phonetics. He still enjoyed, however, the way his name rolled off of his tongue.

“Who cares ‘bout what’s healthy when yer studyin’ law, Shouyou-kun?” he snickered. “If that’s how they wanna see me, who am I to stop ‘em? I think yer the first person to not think ‘m a jerk. ‘M trynna keepin’ it that way, y’know.”

Shouyou blinked. The field of neurolinguistics talked about something like that; how words shaped reality. Psychology had a saying in that too, since therapists usually advised their patients to modify the language they used with themselves to diminish suicidal ideations and lack of self-esteem. He remembered having heard his linguistics professor talking about how English speakers had difficulty differentiating between blue and light blue since their language didn’t have a specific word to tell them apart, whereas Spanish, for example, did have it— azul being blue and celeste being light blue. Tribes in the Amazonas, who didn’t mark directions with left and right but with north, south, east, and west, showed a very above the average sense of direction. Another tribe from another part of the world didn’t have numbers above five, which made it difficult for them to do arithmetic operations.

“So you just follow what they say you are?” he asked, slowly, crumpling the sugar pack in between nervous fingers. Atsumu’s hazel eyes hardened a little upon hearing his question, his eyebrows arching slightly on his forehead, sinking small wrinkles into the sun-kissed skin. “I mean! You— don’t you think that’s, uhm… too easy for them?”

“Whaddaya mean?” Atsumu retorted, squinting at him.

Shouyou choked on his own spit.

“I thought someone like you would… you know… try to prove them wrong?”

An unpleasant silence fell between them, coating the table with the texture of caramel. It seemed to slide over the plastic surface, dripping onto Shouyou’s jeans, scalding hot against his skin.

Then Atsumu barked out a laugh.

“That’d mean I care ‘bout what they think, Shouyou-kun,” Atsumu answered, his shoulders shaking slightly with his laughing fit. Shouyou’s back relaxed a little with his reaction, a little sigh of relief leaving his lips with the breath he didn’t know he was holding. “As long as the people I love the most don’t think of me as a jerk, ‘m fine.”

Shouyou hummed in agreement, pressing the tip of his straw to his lower lip.

Maybe he had a saying in that, too. Or maybe not, since he had known Atsumu for less than a month. What surprised him the most, however, was how _much_ he wanted his opinion to be heard by him.

And so he made his personal mission to turn the concept associated with Miya Atsumu into one that didn’t portray him as the jerk everyone so desperately wanted to believe he was.

Which brought him to the next linguistic concept he could use to define him.

See, according to Saussure, words are _signs_. One of his professors had told him that _sign_ was a sacred word for linguists— and he believed that, too. And thus, you could not just throw the word around as if it meant nothing; Shouyou had very carefully compared Atsumu to words, to the idea his name evoked like trying to put him into a box. He couldn’t do that, either.

Words, just like Atsumu, could not be put into a box. Words have three faces— the sign, the word itself, the signified, which is the image evoked in your head when you hear a word, and the significant; the meaning through which you process the word. It sounded simple at first— just three faces of the same thing. He’d been wrong.

The word might be the same for everyone in a linguistic community, but the signifier changes with every mind.

Atsumu as a person was the sign, his name was the significant, and the image everyone had created of him in their heads was the signified. And for everyone, the last one was different. For everyone else, the signified they evoked when hearing his name was that of a self-centred prick, an asshole ready to spit snarky words and unpleasant truths. For Shouyou, however, the signified was that of a kind, foul-mouthed man that had given up long ago with trying to prove them wrong.

He discovered, too, that the signified could change over time. Because after his third month in college, the signified was that of the man he had fallen in love with. It was a little cliché if you ask him— the new guy falling for the bad boy of the school. The thing was that Shouyou didn’t see Atsumu as the bad guy; he was just a bit sharp around the edges, a bit too straight forward. But he _liked_ that.

No, scratch that. He _loved_ that.

When his fourth month in college rolled around, Shouyou discovered he had managed to change the image Atsumu projected just a little bit. There where he used to find sharp edges in his personality, Shouyou started to find soft answers and looks. Tender smiles that he didn’t expect to see directed at him.

Small things that Atsumu did for him, like allowing him to sleep on his shoulder when he had to stay up all night reading some godforsaken book about Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Atsumu listened to him rambling about how he would surely fail that test because he couldn’t for the life of him understand the concept.

“You’ve changed, Atsumu-san,” Shouyou said, wrapping his arms around Atsumu’s neck. Somehow he’d managed to push the noise out of his mind— the music beating like the heart of a sleeping best underneath the sole of his feet, hammering in the back of his head. The conversations of his peers, the barks of laughter of drunken college students. They were all cramped together in a small place, the living room of some of his classmates, but he was too immersed in the way Atsumu’s breath ghosted over his lips to remember who the house owner was. “You’re… kinder, now.”

Atsumu smiled. He smelled like whisky, mint and tobacco. Shouyou took a deep inhale, trying to soak himself in the fragrance that seemed to concentrate in the hollow of his throat. His eyes followed the motion of his Adam’s apple bobbing, entranced with the feather-like feeling over his lips; if he concentrated enough, he could almost feel the scalding-hot skin under his mouth.

“Well,” Atsumu began, shrugging. His fingers were trembling slightly against Shouyou’s hips, his fingertips digging into the thin layer of muscle there. Shouyou knew they would leave bruises behind and the idea of waking up to see the marks made a shiver go down his spine. “Someone thought too highly of me. I had to live up to their expectations, y’know?”

Shouyou frowned slightly.

“Are you talking about me?”

Atsumu giggled. He fucking _giggled_ and Shouyou’s entire world crumbled in front of him like a sandcastle.

“’Course ‘m talkin’ ‘bout ya, Shouyou-kun,” he whispered, leaning in. His lips moved a few millimetres away from Shouyou’s; it felt like he was tempting him, challenging him to cross the distance and kiss him. And oh, Shouyou wanted nothing but to give in to the temptation of this actual linguistic enigma looking at him with half-lidded eyes and a smirk that would be the death of him. “Ya think I’d change for someone who’s not worth my time? Ya wound me.”

Shouyou pressed his lips into a flat line. There was a smile fighting tooth and nail to make its way to his face, pulling at the corners of his mouth like its life depended on it. He refrained from smiling, however; he wanted to keep his cool.

It was worthless. Atsumu’s giggle was playing on loop in his head, stretching its fingers like a reddish fog lifting in his brain, devouring every single thing he had saved in the hard drive in his head.

Among all the things he had learned in his four months as a linguistics student, he discovered he couldn’t really define Atsumu in any of the disciplines that fell under the umbrella of linguistics. Semantics? Atsumu didn’t have any meaning. He existed for the sake of it like every person did. Phonetics and phonology? Shouyou could easily divide the syllables of his name, classify every sound produced by his mouth to say it out loud. Morphology? Grammar? Pragmatics—

Atsumu’s mouth pressed against Shouyou’s in a small peck that made his heart flutter. His stomach seemed to disappear as if someone had replaced it with a void and he was falling through it into the endless pit of desire.

Shouyou’s fingers gripped the hem of Atsumu’s shirt, yanking him down once he put some distance between them just to give him a lazy, lopsided smile.

“If you’re gonna kiss me,” he began, his lips moving over Atsumu’s. Shouyou could feel the shiver that went down his spine and he felt thrilled when the idea that he had the same effect on him Atsumu had popped up into his mind, “do it properly.”

“Getting’ a bit demandin’, aren’t we?” Atsumu whispered. His voice was raspy and low, desire dripping from his words. Shouyou barely remembered about Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory— how the human brain picks up only what’s interesting to it. He wasn’t surprised when he realized he’d picked up everything about Atsumu because all of it was interesting.

“Sue me,” he giggled, standing on his tiptoes to press a new kiss to his mouth.

This time, Atsumu’s arms wrapped around his waist, pressing their bodies flush until there wasn’t any millimetre between them. As if he wanted to become one with Shouyou.

As his lips moved in sync and the music changed its beat, Shouyou realized he couldn’t really put Atsumu into pretentious, poorly written concepts learned on a class. He was so much more than that and it felt like all those months he tried to categorize him had gone to waste.

“Ya taste like beer,” Atsumu murmured, a thin thread of saliva linking their mouths.

Shouyou chuckled. Truth be told, he hadn’t wasted those four months. In his own way, he’d tried to understand Atsumu. In his own way, he’d tried to help him see he wasn’t what the rest of the world wanted to make him seem.

That wasn’t a waste.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! 
> 
> Come scream at me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/eli_tan_)! 


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